Brunswick to New Smyrna Beach

January 26, 2008

We’re doing a day layover in Daytona Beach at the Halifax Harbor Marina. Enough of a week of showery, cloudy, chilly weather – lows in the 40’s and high’s in the low sixties – not bad for June in Maine, but we want 70’s which will return next week after this series of cold fronts that has brought strong north, northwest, northeast winds. We’ll go tomorrow when it’s supposed to be sunny and in the 60’s, still blowing from the north behind us which is the good part.

There’s resentment in the weather. The cold, north winds are like fists punched from a fat bully with feet stuck in the snows of Iowa and Ohio whose arms will only occasionally flail this far to where its green and he wants to make the most of each slug. Journey gets leaned over against marina floats and her rigging moans in protest. Judy and Bill convinced us to buy an electric heater when in Brunswick, and we are very grateful they did. It keeps the cabin a cozy 70 degrees and dryer than the propane heater.

We left Brunswick on the 22nd to catch high tide on Jekyll Creek where low tide drains the channel to three feet. It was a another twisty passage plotted on the Cumberland River, St. Andrews Sound, Cumberland Dividings to Cumberland Sound where we had planned to anchor off of – you guessed it – Cumberland Island National Park, but we had been hearing warnings all day of dense fog moving down the coast of Georgia and it caught us there, obliterating Cumberland Island and forcing radar, chart plotter navigation across the mouth of the St. Mary’s river – the dividing line between Georgia and Florida.

The shore of the St. Mary’s River is literally posted with “Keep Out” signs planted by the US Navy. Huge rectangular buildings rise out of the marsh to house part of the nuclear submarine fleet. A veteran of the waterway told us that if you’re near when a sub comes in, an advancing patrol boat orders you to turn your boat away from the sub and stop, about as reliable of a command as a lady wanting to change clothes in the open and saying to a group of teenage boys “turnaround and don’t peek." There were enough channel markers approaching the St Mary’s River that a submariner could find his way by brail.

We crossed the mouth of the St. Mary’s River into the Amelia River and had toyed with anchoring at Fernandina Beach, Florida. A cruising guide states: “For those who enjoy anchoring out, this spot delightfully combines the privacy of swinging on the hook with the convenience of having downtown Fernandina only a short dinghy ride away.” It mentions only in passing the two stinking pulp mills on the bank with roaring steam valves that equal the delight of anchoring in the marshes off the end of a JFK runway. We ventured on, passing the “lovingly restored” 1900’s Main Street a few miles on to anchor peacefully in a nook off of the South Amelia River.

The next day our goal was St. Augustine via Swampit and Sisters Creeks to the St. John River. As we approached the St. Johns River, luckily a bridge tender radioed that a bridge further down the ICW between us and St. Augustine was closed until 5:30 for maintenance work. Like salmon, we decided to return to the sea via the St. John River sail south for about 30 miles and come back in the St. Augustine Inlet. There was a light northeast wind behind, and five foot swells on the stern quarter. Journey sighed. We motor sailed, then motored to make the St. Augustine inlet before dark, our first inlet approach since Cape May.

St. Augustine Inlet

We’ve learned from listening to the radio that the best local knowledge is from the tow boat services, the kind that rescued us in Gloucester. St. Augustine Seatow told us via cell phone that the inlet had been dredged two years ago, but be sure to follow the buoys, the only strategy because we had discovered both electronic and paper charts are blank in the area of the inlet except to show two rectangles of dredge spoil ground with a channel between. They said reach the outer buoy then head for the landmark of the 220 foot tall stainless steel cross, the site of Our Lady of la Leche Shrine the location of the first Catholic Mass and mission on land that would become the United States.

The approach seemed like we were sailing straight at a beach with breakers. The wind and swells were from the north, the inlet runs east-west. We turned west into what appeared a maelstrom of breaking seas and eddies. The swells were breaking on the dredge spoil on the starboard side of the channel and on the beach in front of us. We surfed on confused swells that made their way into the inlet. A one knot current was against us. The red and green buoys marking the starboard and port sides of the channel were hard to spot in the seas, the fathometer ranged from 8 to 15 feet beneath the keel. As we went through the inlet we were within 200 feet of the beach on the barrier island to the south. Exciting.

Once inside we were in calm waters in front of the Castillo de San Marcos, a Spanish-built fortress constructed between 1672 and 1695 to protect St. Augustine from pirate raids, and to protect against the British encroaching on Spain’s interest in maintaining the offshore Bahama channel as a highway for its plunder of the “New World.”

We went south on the Matanzas River past the city marina and downtown water front, continued a mile or so and turned west and back north into the much narrower San Sebastian River to the boat yard we had called in advance to arrange to make a repair on the refrigerator. No need to bore you with the story of the yard’s inability to make the repair that resulted in our getting two free nights of dockage because they couldn’t live up to the promise, nor how the refrigerator seems to have healed itself, again.

St. Augustine’s Back Door

By being on the San Sebastian we walked into St. Augustine through its back door, an historic African-American neighborhood called Lincolnville, that had small houses, front porches, lots of churches and the warmth of coming in through the kitchen of someone’s home. We stopped at the Excelsior Museum and Cultural Center of Lincolnville, newly opened in the Excelsior school, a segregated school that closed in 1958.

As it happened, at the same time another white couple, even older than us, stopped in. The museum director and her assistant greeted us at the desk, delighted to have visitors and gave a personal tour of the museum’s collection that included numerous photographs of graduates who became nurses, entertainers and educators, a facsimile of a diploma that had the word “colored” in gothic type above the student’s name, and most striking was the painted wooden sign from the Monson Motel, the place where its owner was photographed pouring muriatic acid into the motel pool where black and white demonstrators swam, a moment of hate and fear that became an iconic image of the civil rights movement the day before the US Senate passed the Civil Rights act of 1964.

We walked by the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Lincolnville where Martin Luther King preached in April, 1964. At his encouragement, northern whites came to St. Augustine, including Mrs. John Burgess, the wife of the Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts and Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, wife of the governor of our state. Both of these elderly white ladies were arrested for eating with blacks at a restaurant, generating another national story that advanced the cause.

St. Augustine’s front door was installed in the 1880’s by Henry Flagler, the Rockefeller partner and primo Florida real estate tycoon. It included the Ponce de Leon Hotel that is now part of Flagler College. There is the requisite pedestrian mall of antique, clothing and gift shops.

St. Augustine to Daytona Beach was a long day, but allowed four hours of sailing with the jib on a whisker pole to catch strong northerly breezes dead behind us most of the way. We had two spectacular dinners at the Cellar Restaurant, and listened in the distance to race cars at the Daytona Speedway doing a 24 hour race. They were luckily quieted during the night by the wind building and shifting to the northeast and blowing the sound away.

January 27, 2008

Left Daytona Beach and sailed again with strong northerlies. Clouds rapidly dissipated, but it stayed cold. An engine alarm sounded as we were idling awaiting a bridge to open at its 20 minute interval and noted the oil pressure was low, but returned to normal when we increased RPMs. Decided to stop at New Smyrna Beach Marina, checked the oil level and leaks and all seems fine, but decided to stay as it would be too late to make the next safe anchorage. Our shortest day of the entire trip, 15 nautical miles.

Like all small towns along the waterway, New Smyrna Beach has the same, Sunday-deserted main street with shops and services that are the remnant of what has fled to outlying shopping centers. No grocery and only a mediocre cup of coffee was available, but laundry and blog updates are getting done and we’ll be out of here first thing in the morning.